Every employee brings two things to work: what they have to do and what they could do, if they’re truly inspired. Discretionary effort is the gap between these, and it involves both meeting the basic requirements of your job description and going above and beyond.
But according to leadership expert Russell E. Justice, discretionary effort isn’t just about putting in more hours or working harder. Justice has spent five decades applying his background in engineering and behavioral science to help leaders create a “want to” culture in their workplaces—and it’s simpler than you’d think.
What discretionary effort is (and isn’t)
Discretionary effort, by definition, involves providing extra effort beyond what’s required by your role. But Justice takes this idea a step further by looking at the difference between “have to” and “want to.”
“Every person comes to work every day with a pocketful of discretionary effort,” he says. “They don’t have to spend it. They can do their job without it and go back home.” Discretionary effort is used in our personal lives all the time—when we sign up for our kids’ PTA or volunteer to organize a friend’s bachelor party. At work, some employees go the extra mile, while others do exactly what’s needed to keep their jobs and nothing more.
But it’s not about who stays in the office longer or who takes on extra responsibilities. “Folks that exhibit [discretionary effort] act [like] they have two jobs, not just one,” he adds. “Job one is how to do it the best-known way today. Job two is to find a better way to do it tomorrow.”
When leaders crack the code, they create a different atmosphere, one that results in a greater sense of teamwork, a visible sense of pride and shared ownership of results that trickles down. It’s even physical. “You can actually see [enthusiasm] in the physical appearance of people,” Justice says. “They’re more innovative, more cooperative.… We’re changing the chemistry inside of our people, and you can see it on them.”
Why leaders miss the mark
In his book, This Is What Leaders Do, Justice explains the ABCs of leadership: antecedent, behavior and consequence.
“People do what they do because of what happens to them when they do it,” he says. “We tend to spend all our time on the A, the antecedents, the things that come before behaviors, trying to get people to do things, trying to motivate them.”
However, that’s the issue. The key to changing behavior instead lies in what happens afterwards. “Leaders spend… time on the front-end, the antecedents, and not nearly enough time on the consequences,” he continues, “which is the ultimate thing that will determine whether behaviors happen or not.”
How to spark “want to” in your organization
Leaders often say that they want engaged employees but don’t necessarily follow through on the conditions that foster that level of engagement, beyond financial compensation.
To help with this, Justice suggests several practices that leaders can implement to spark a culture of “want to” instead of “have to”:
Make performance immediately visible
The first step is to ensure that your employees’ hard work can be seen in real time, not weeks later in an accounting report. As an example, extra effort is displayed immediately on a scoreboard that’s visible to players and the crowd during a sports match. The workplace isn’t so different.
“We have to have feedback, information about how we’re doing during the game, so we can change the outcomes,” Justice explains. “Scoreboards have to be in the language of the front line, the workforce. The language of senior leaders is dollars.… The language of middle managers, primarily, is percentages.… [And] the language of the frontline is usually counting.… So we’re looking for those kinds of scoreboards out there.”
When Justice worked with American Greetings, employees walked into work each day on a roll of paper that signified how many feet of wrapping paper the company had produced the previous year. Beside it was a roll of paper that represented what had been produced the previous week, with the company-wide goal of increasing the feet of wrapping paper produced per dollar spent.
“And then there’s a third row of the goal for this year,” he adds. “So they’re actually walking in on their piece of paper—and that, of course, makes them want to make that piece of paper longer.”
Overtly recognize and celebrate your people
Justice also advises in-the-moment recognition. “People are looking to see, ‘Are you going to recognize what I’m doing or not?’” he says.
A heartfelt gesture goes a long way, he believes. This is as simple as giving someone a pack of Life Savers with a note explaining how their action “saved” you.
He also recommends real celebrations that will have a tangible impact on your workforce. No two organizations will have an identical notion of what makes the perfect celebration, though. He cites an example where sales reps with the highest improvements in their conversions were given a trip anywhere in the country to a golf course of their choice—with their supervisor as their caddy. “You can imagine what that did to sales,” Justice laughs.
Be consistent
He also cautions against shiny object syndrome, a trap that leaders often fall into each year. To avoid this, they should “maintain constancy of purpose.”
“[Leaders] can’t keep changing the focus all the time,” he says. “One of the biggest destroyers of success is annual planning, where, because the calendar flipped over to a new year, we come up with a new set of things to do.…They get seduced by the latest thing that’s come along instead of being faithful to the thing that they’ve already committed to.”
The change doesn’t always have to start at the top, though. “Major changes begin at the grassroots,” he continues. “You have so much success there that it spreads contagiously throughout the organization.”
Often, the reaction to improvements at a lower level is to report success to upper management, but Justice recommends another approach. “What we’re going to do is do such a great job here that [corporate] can’t ignore it. They’re going to come to us,” he says. “That’s the way it’s happened for me through the years. It spreads contagiously from a pocket of interest.”
Leaders are conductors
Justice believes that every leader has to orchestrate improvement. “You can have the greatest musicians in the world,” he says, “but as long as they don’t know the song they’re going to play, it’s [just] noise.” This is why leaders have to step up and show the way. “Then, everybody can play their instrument to make some beautiful music. The job of the leader is to orchestrate and prove they become that conductor.”
When leaders get discretionary effort right, employees don’t just play their instruments—they make music.
Photo by Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock.com
